Touchpoints do more than just grab a user’s attention within the online catalog. They are a piece of the marketing puzzle and when implemented correctly they give your online catalog an advantage over your competitors. Touchpoints are interactions between the customers and your brand, improving customer experience and encouraging product interaction. They are designed to have minimal distraction to the design of the page and photo. They can trigger actionable pop-ups, product data page or additional information links. Just like in real estate, it’s all about location(really it’s placement), especially for the mobile experience.

Planning the careful placement of a touchpoint pays off when we take the product from a desktop/tablet two page landscape experience to the mobile single page experience. Placing that touchpoint too close to the middle of a two page spread could mean that part of the icon get’s cut off or is missing entirely. The practice for touchpoints is twofold, Don’t use so many that the user can’t see the product and watch that placement. Our production team are experts at the location part of this, but always welcome input as we produce your latest catalog.

Last year the Out-of-this-World Gift Guide for Kids was a huge hit! This year we decided to continue the tradition and present the 2016 Kids Gift Guide! Maybe you’ve finished your shopping or maybe like many of us, you’re looking for that last minute gift idea. Either way, we’ve made it easy for you to browse the entire gift guide or jump to different sections using the Contents tab.

Similar to last year, we have it broken down into three sections: Educational Gifts, Unique Gifts and Magnificent Gifts (our personal favorite section). Kids can easily lend you a hand by bookmarking their favorite items. They may even see some nice educational toys that maybe weren’t on the original letter to Santa. Jolly Old St. Nick’s hat is in the toolbar which launches everyone’s favorite Santa Tracker.

We hope you enjoy the guide as much as we enjoyed building it! Feel free to share with family and friends, especially if you see something that maybe you might enjoy playing with this year. When all of the new gifts are unwrapped, some of those gently used toys may need a new home. To get you started, on the back cover of our guide, you will find several local charities who will pass along the toys that may have found their way to the bottom of the toy box.

The Holiday Shopping season is here. According to NRF online sales are expected to increase 7 to 10 percent and in-store sales are expected to increase 3.6 percent. Our online catalog has you covered when you need unique catalog solutions integrating with your existing e-Commerce. For the in-store sales surge retailers are predicted to hire an additional 640,000 to 690,000 seasonal workers. With that kind of rush, your holiday workers need to be trained quickly and efficiently! Some things to keep in mind when approaching the training:

1. Assume they are all starting from the same base level of knowledge. Experienced seasonal workers will be able to absorb the basics faster, but a refresher is generally welcome.

2. Use current employees that have good work habits to provide training and support. Nothing says you are important to us than by putting your trust in a solid employee.

3. Communicate expectations and feedback accurately and in a timely manner. Being very clear early on and holding team members accountable creates trust.

4. Put all your materials into an online training bookshelf that is easy to access by users in the store and remotely. It helps seasonal workers become more familiar with your brand and products. With our bookshelf, your training content and videos can be incorporated along side your catalogs and latest flyers. Our interactive features in the training guide keep trainees engaged and encourage learning. Giving both new and experienced employees access, enables them to see all the information you want them to have including the latest deals and product promotions that customers are shopping for.

Your seasonal workers may only be around for a few months but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be educated effectively. You’re relying on them during the busiest time of the year and hope that they come back again next year. Management will be pressed for time, so equip them with an online tool to quickly and efficiently educate your new employees. We want your guide to be the best experience for trainees and a time saver for management.

In the quiet of your office, working after everyone else has gone home, you take a look at the sales results from the latest catalog and there it is, GOOOAAAALLLLL!!! The cleaning crew is a little startled at your reaction, but the extra information you sent to Dirxion along with the catalog pages has paid off. Now you can attend the campaign summary meeting tomorrow morning with a clear ROI statement simply because you appended each product link with a unique campaign ID.

Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, or one of the other e-commerce tracking options generally allow you
to create individual campaigns for tracking their performance. As is the case with Google Analytics, most of these options give you a tool to create unique parameters to add to your URL’s. When the Fall 2016 Catalog is ready to go online, you can use something like the Google URL Builder to create the appropriate add-on to your existing product URL. The result should look something like this, source=catalog&utm_campaign=lightingcatalogsupplement

When added to the catalog product links you can track the exact revenue coming out of the each digital catalog. Looking at the Conversions section in Google Analytics, you should see something like this.

Finally you go home for the evening knowing you have the right information that proves the value of the online catalog that Dirxion created for you.

We revisit this topic occasionally, with the desire to challenge our customers to give the digital publications occasional strategic placement. Time and again they see marked improvement when the online version of their print material is promoted in conjunction with the print hitting the streets. To help out, we thought we’d take a quick look at the premier locations for placement based on current web site design trends. Keeping in mind that the best websites are built responsively and recent Comscore study showed mobile commerce was up 40 percent in the 1st Qtr of 2016 compared to the 1st Qtr of 2015. More results of the study can be found inSourcing Journal Online.

On The Page Is Still Better Than Build It & They Will Come

Obviously from the top to the bottom of a single page, we can easily identify the areas that perform the best. Above the fold is optimal and most sites will rotate the important content to the top(1). However, the scroll or swipe is so prevalent that maybe the secondary position(2) on the site where the it’s just beginning to peek onto the screen may exceed your expectations without taking away the prime real estate of that top banner. Ease of navigation is still the cornerstone of website design and heat maps continue to show high activity in the top toolbar. Those locations are usually locked in pretty early in your overall website design. Your average webmaster is not likely to commit a top level navigation element for the digital catalog. However, there’s usually room to be had for a small call out(3) in that space. If you already have a responsive website and that call out gets in the way, your web designer should be able to quickly determine the screen size where that element needs to drop out.

Never leave a good man behind, especially one that works well on mobile.

Okay, you’ve elected to drop the call out to the digital catalog from your mobile optimized version. Fair enough, but we continue to see strong growth in the performance of the mobile version of the catalog. Dropping your digital publication entirely from the mobile experience may suggest that the pages don’t look great on a mobile device. In fact with the ease of zooming and higher resolution screens on current mobile devices the images and text look great while all the functionality is retained. So go ahead and use that mobile menu(4) to give users access to the catalog. We’ve seen it grouped with other shopping tools or creating a navigation option for it in the drop down menu.

Sharing is caring or at least it’s finding shoppers where they are at.

Omni-channel is maybe an over used buzzword today, but when it fits… Simply put, getting the catalog into the hands of your shoppers no matter where they find it is always a good practice. There’s really two ways to accomplish this, the first is posting it on your relevant social media outlets(5a). Our crop and share tool empowers marketers to share images with links to that product in the catalog. Go ahead and build that Pinterest Board with a collection of items from the latest catalog or create an ideabook on Houzz to showcase those items that are going to grab your users attention. Taking it to the natural extension of social media, you have the opportunity to engage users in an online conversation(5b). If you are using any tools to capture references on social media, you can respond with a link to the online publication. The digital catalog can prove more relevant than simply a link to the site because it’s current and ready to browse. Do you really know the exact product that Twitter user is looking for? Sharing the digital catalog provides greater impact because it’s not the standard link a user would expect.

Do you have more examples of placing your digital publication that has driven more activity and consequently more revenue? Please share in a comment below.

Quickly — think of an industry that is still rooted in Adobe’s Flash technology?

Yes, a technology that has been on a downslide since the advent of smartphones; a technology that is nearing further disability from major browsers for its security vulnerabilities; and a technology that now exists in pseudonym (see “Adobe Animate”) because its creator so desperately wants to move on.

There are a few answers that come to mind, like computer gaming and video streaming, both of which are realizing the need to wriggle out of Flash’s development grips and find their way toward a more-reliable future. After all, Chrome and Firefox unexpectedly blocked Flash technology a little less than a year ago today. The block, though temporary, sent a grim message across the web to Flash developers: move on or risk having nothing.

The industry that Dirxion is concerned with, of course, is digital publishing. This industry is stubborn and resilient in its use of Flash, even though Adobe wants more to be recognized for its own transition to HTML5. Still today, nearly 10 years since the release of Apple’s first iPhone, most digital publishing kits are brought to you by Flash.

Each of these industries has been touched by Adobe Flash. Let that passive voice sink in for a moment. Anyone who has posted online advertising in the past five years has likely been relying heavily on Flash. It is that pervasive.

But now, nearly a year has passed since the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) laid out an overhaul to its display creative guidelines that make HTML5 the new standard in interactive marketing. The efforts further encourage agencies to move away from Adobe’s Flash, which for years has been the unofficial standard. It was a hugely-important-but-unsurprising move by IAB. It really marked the end of Adobe Flash, and here’s why.

Google said the move will “enhance the browsing experience for more people on more devices.” It will also force a bevy of online advertisers to shape up before next year. Changes will come even sooner, with June 30, 2016, being a prominent date on which ads built in Flash can no longer be uploaded into AdWords and DoubleClick Digital Marketing. If things aren’t clear enough, Google deliberately points out that “it’s important to update your display ads to HTML5 before these dates.”

Some loyalty to Flash is easy to understand: since its invention, Flash has been the lifeblood to industries like digital publishing. Dirxion, along with everybody else providing such services, was at one point deeply entrenched in Flash.

But IAB, Google and a whole wide world of HTML5 developers wants to show us that Adobe Flash is the past, HTML5 is the future and too many of us are stuck in a messy in-between. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem like there is an option, and it is mobile-or-bust in a smartphone-entranced society. HTML5 will eventually prevail.

“In 1960 New York City – the high-powered and glamorous “Golden Age” of advertising – Don Draper, the biggest ad man in the business, struggles to stay a step ahead of the rapidly changing times and the young executives nipping at his heels.” (http://imdb.to/1Paqu9j) Meanwhile masses of sales and marketing teams were creating 3 ring binders like mad men. Piecing together all those catalogs and collateral sections together manually and adding urgent updated pages when needed.

In 1996, Nintendo 64 was released harboring some of the most influential games ever available; Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda. All while N64 was being sold in masses, some daring marketing teams moved on to file sharing the collateral on a ‘hard to find’ local drive.

Then came PowerPoint, which really didn’t come on strong until 2002. In 2002 the animation engine in PowerPoint was massively overhauled, allowing users to create advanced and custom animations. It was a great upgrade but training was needed. The files were still too large to email and there is no interactivity available.

Online file sharing through companies such as DropBox™ was the next big thing to hit, it’s great for sharing files but anyone with access to the folder can delete or move files at anytime. It’s also not going to be your go to for presenting high quality publications and content to your customers.

From sales binders to online file sharing, these widely used options lack in key areas, especially transactional sales, searching capabilities, and responsive online/offline use. No one wants to have all these options spread out randomly, it gets confusing and cumbersome for the user. Combining all your needs into one solution packed with powerful tools will arm your sales team to smoothly overcome these obstacles.

We create the online catalogs designed to increase engagement between customers and sales. By using an order form or integrating with your existing eCommerce site, the barriers to purchase are significantly reduced.

Here at Dirxion we believe it’s very important to show appreciation toward all our wonderful moms, especially around this time of the year. We know, it’s a little early to celebrate Mother’s day, but there’s another special lady that we should show appreciation to: Mother Nature.

While others might consider Earth Day more of a singular day celebration, we look at it the same way we approach Mother’s Day. What gifts would make her entire life better? How can we make life easier for her, not just today?

It’s important to not only go out and make a difference but to give thanks to the people and companies who are trying to make an environmental impact every day. Dirxion is fortunate enough to work with many great businesses who find the same importance in providing eco friendly products and solutions as we do ourselves.

We have gathered a few earth friendly products from our customers which can be implemented to better impact Mother Nature. Not only will Mother Nature appreciate these gifts, but so will the other mommy’s in your life *wink wink*.

Inspiring would be home chefs to do the right thing, Kohler has dedicated an entire catalog to their Eco Friendly kitchen products, http://bit.ly/1VBRhmz.

The Healthy Hair Eco-Friendly Bamboobrush by Olivia Garden helps to preserve the environment. Stronger and lighter than wood this brush is 100% natural boar bristles with 1 nylon pin for easier styling. You can find just the right back to nature products for yourself or Mom in the latest Ulta Flyer.

Bella+Canvas has created the Organic Jersey for that casual “I love the environment but don’t need to show it off” look, This updated essential fits like a well-loved favorite, designed with an eco-friendly organic combed and ring-spun

The KD110 collection scrubs from Barco Camy are made to make a difference: 50% of the fabric is recycled from 5 plastic bottles. The cute top has a feminine shape and a comfy blend of soft material. Five roomy pockets and a small pocket provide you plenty of space to carry your accessories. Side slits give you ease of movement.

Similar to the mom’s impacting our lives everyday, Mother Nature needs a little more TLC than a card or bouquet of flowers. We should take a step to give her a positive impact on a lifestyle level that helps, big or small, everyday. Happy Earth Day Mother Nature!

It’s been a good year for the real estate market, and David Charron (real estate market expert) expects continued growth! Consumers purchasing new or used homes are a strong indication of future consumer purchases from furniture retailers. Retailers know that by offering multi-channel shopping options, consumers are more likely to purchase. Users want a digital catalog that’s a complement to both a print catalog and an e-commerce site.

Restoration Hardware make their printed sourcebooks a top priority and utilize the digital edition as an important complement to the print. Easily found on and tightly integrated with their website, their shoppers are able to switch from one sourcebook to the next while keeping the brand’s trademark style. Providing a one-of-a-kind shopping experience is the number one goal for our digital catalogs. The same can be said for MacKenzie-Childs. They care about giving their customers an engaging opportunity to shop through their catalog whether it’s in print or on any connected device.

Allow your customers to immerse themselves in an online catalog where they can interact and easily shop your furniture brand. Online activity drives retail sales more than ever, whether they browse online and then shop at brick and mortar or purchase directly from the online catalog.

Once your print catalog is published, it’s out the door and you can’t track how or when users engage with it. However, if you choose to expand your brand with a digital catalog not only can you view the overall traffic your catalog is receiving, but also individual page views and how customers discovered your interface. Now, with that being said, it sounds like it’s quite simple, right? But Google Analytics definitely has a learning curve. To simplify everything, we created a Basic Google Analytics Guide for your Dirxion Digital Publication.

If you already have a Dirxion Digital Publication or you’re just curious about how Google Analytics can help give you a better understanding of the way consumers shop, visit http://www.dirxion.com/GoogleAnalyticsGuide/ to download a free guide.